Covenant Cruises into Final, Wins Maiden Lagos Debate Open

Barely three months after emerging champions at the 6th All-Nigeria Universities Debating Championship (ANUDC), Covenant University was again the team to beat at the maiden edition of the Lagos Debate Open, as it won the championship. The Lagos Debate Open (LDO) was hosted by the University of Lagos.

The LDO was a Pan-African elite tournament with teams from all over West Africa participating. Ayafa Tonye Amada, leading other members of the Covenant University team from the Literary and Debate Society (CULDS) had a commanding and comfortable cruise into the final of the championship, pairing with a colleague from another university (as is the practice with Debate Opens) and clearly outmatched other debaters and delegates to cruise into the grand finale and eventually flying the Covenant flag so high as the team to beat.

A pair of the University of Ghana, Legon and University of Calabar came second; while the teams from Universities of Port Harcourt and Lagos (the host) came third and fourth.

The year 2018 has been a season of victories for Covenant University, from core Time Higher Education universities ranking to publications profile, and of course student-based intellectual activities, top of which are topflight literary and debate championships. Just last September, Covenant beat all odds to beat traditional strongholds among public universities of the ANUDC. It shattered the records of ANUDC by being the first private university to win the tournament and went ahead to also produce the best individual debaters and speakers in the championship.

In the literary and debate circuit in Nigeria in which private universities are far behind and thus established a separate private universities debate championship, Covenant has dared the odds by boldly entering into the conventional debate unions and emerging tops. Just last year, a senior faculty of the University who also founded and has led CULDS since 2014, Prof. Sheriff Folarin emerged as the National Vice-President of the ANUDC and chaired the Council of the organization at the last tournament at the University of Ilorin. Recently too, the CULDS launched an anthology of stories, being the first university-based literary society to embark on such laudable intellectual enterprise.